August 1996

Roland Tharp, director of the Center on Meeting the Educational Needs of Diverse Student Populations, a federally funded research center at the University of California at Santa Cruz, has pored over thousands of studies on cross-cultural learning. All of the studies, he says, point to four basic ways educators can enhance learning for students of diverse cultural groups.

A Biased Test?
"Taking on the Test'' [May/June], by David Hill, left out some important arguments rebutting the claims of those who still defend the California Basic Education Skills Test (CBEST).

A few years back, when I was dean of boys at a New York City high school, my most frequent customers were the kids who bashed each other over all sorts of obscure points of honor. In one case, the issue of contention was the ownership of a lollipop. Those hapless miscreants were more sensitive to real or imagined slights than the haughtiest Gascon you're likely to run into this side of Cyrano de Bergerac.